Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Break Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration

Posted on February 27, 2018

Common Justice

The United States faces two distinct but interconnected challenges: violence and mass incarceration.

Ensuring safety is an urgent and essential responsibility of a society and is a core dimension of delivering on the promise of justice. The United States has been remiss in attempts to fulfill that responsibility because of an overreliance on incarceration as the primary pathway to ensuring safety. Substantially reducing violence will require acknowledging the limitations of prisons as a strategy to deliver safety or justice. And ending mass incarceration in America will require taking on the question of violence.